How Fast We’ve Moved Online

September 18, 2014

Moving Online

It was only 5 years ago when the iPad was no more than a Steve Jobs dream and smartphones were a luxury rather than necessity. It is crazy to think that only 5 short years on iPads are in 50% of all households and 70% of Australians older than 16 own a smartphone.

More and more of our lives are moving online as the products and services we use regularly are becoming more readily accessible over the internet. This shift to spending more time online has seen the digital advertising industry explode from $236 million in 2003, to a whopping $4 billion in 2013; equating to almost a third of all adverting.

Today, there are 17.5 million Australians who have spent $14.9 billion of our hard earned money online and spend more than 285 hours of our time on the internet every year. That is a serious amount of money and time spent on the internet!

This continual and rapid increase of using the internet puts high demand on products and services that allow users to access the content they are after. Video content for entertainment and news delivery is a key driver of increased internet speeds. The challenge of providing faster internet speeds to keep up with the ever increasing demand for content is limited by the networks and hardware available. The National Broadband Network (NBN) will dramatically improve the online experience for Australians and will inevitably keep the whole cycle going.

Only time will tell whether the decision to scale the NBN rollout back to reduce outlay costs was a good idea or incredibly short-sighted. If the last 5 years is anything to go by there’s a good chance the NBN, in its current design, will soon by in need of an upgrade to keep up with our growing demands for online content.